A woman who claims she can have an on demand out-of-body experience is helping scientists unlock the mystery behind the strange phenomenon. Source: ThinkStock

A CANADIAN woman who claims she can have an out-of-body experience at will is helping shed light on the phenomenon to answer whether it’s a spiritual spectacle or all in the mind.

Many would dismiss this as hocus pocus but in an article by the Daily Mail the 24-year-old woman claims she is able to drift outside her body whenever she wants, watching herself as she moves freely around in the space above. A skill she thought everybody could do.

This out-of-body happening is known as an ‘extra-corporeal experience’ (ECE) and is believed to result from areas of the brain associated with kinaesthetic imagery, which handles the sensation of moving. But this is only usually something reported to have occurred in those with brain abnormalities.

Scientists at the University of Ottawa in Canada are using the woman with the very ordinary brain and her extraordinary claims to see what’s going on. After several tests and scans scientists revealed that she could be the first person studied to be able to have ECE on demand.

It was found that when she had her out-of-body experience it involved a “strong deactivation of the visual cortex” and left areas of her brain were high in activity.

This scan reveals the brain activity on the left side during an out-of-body experienceSource: Supplied

When she describes her experience she explains:

“I feel myself moving, or, more accurately, can make myself feel as if I am moving.”

“I know perfectly well that I am not actually moving. There is no duality of body and mind when this happens, not really. In fact, I am hyper-sensitive to my body at that point, because I am concentrating so hard on the sensation of moving. If I “spin” for long enough, I get dizzy.”

“I do not see myself above my body. Rather, my whole body has moved up. I feel it as being above where I know it actually is. I usually also picture myself as moving up in my mind’s eye, but the mind is not substantive. It does not move unless the body does,” she said.

The participant described her experience as one she began performing as a child when bored with “sleep time” at preschool. She discovered she could elicit the experience of moving above her body and used this as a distraction during the time kids were asked to nap. She continued to perform this experience as she grew up assuming, as mentioned, that “everyone could do it.” -

Sceptics are likely to remain just that, but scientists are linking these out-of-body reports to brain activity and now have evidence that such phenomena are all in the mind.

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